Hawk Harrelson Doesn't Like Sabermetrics, Sun Rises In The East

By Chuck Sudo in News on Apr 12, 2013 9:40PM

White Sox television announcer Ken "Hawk" Harrelson is too old to change now. (Can you imagine how he would have handled Thursday night's bench clearing melee between the Dodgers and Padres? It would have been the polar opposite to the grace of Vin Scully.)

So while Harrelson's obscure references, rampant homerism and and ongoing (possibly unrequited) bromance with Carl Yastrzemski are tolerated by most, rants like his tirade against sabermetrics during last night's loss to the Nationals are too good to ignore. We're nine games into the season and already Harrelson has made headlines.

For those who missed it, Harrelson said sabermetrics — using mathematical and statistical analysis of baseball records and individual player performance in order to field competitive teams — is "the most overrated thing to come into baseball" in the past 10 years.

"Give me some guys who want to win a baseball game," Harrelson added while shaking his cane. This didn't sit well with MLB Network analyst Brian Kenny, a noted sabermetrics acolyte. Kenny proceeded to take down Harrelson, which isn't hard.

As Deadspin's Tom Ley noted, Kenny seemed to be legitimately angered by Harrelson's latest "get off my lawn" moment. To be fair, Harrelson's opinion of sabermetrics isn't isolated; Hall of Fame second baseman and former broadcaster Joe Morgan often used his position at ESPN to rail against sabermetrics, particularly the "moneyball" philosophy of Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane. If Harrelson needs another example of a team that has utilized sabermetrics to field a winner, he need only look at the Washington club that swept the Sox last night.

Harrelson, in his rant, said sabermetrics "got a lot of people fired." Another way to look at it is the success of sabermetrics in Oakland and in Boston, where Theo Epstein and Bill James combined to build a team that won two World Series, forced MLB clubs to seriously reconsider how they approached scouting by combining the best elements of scouting and statistical analysis. As Kenny said in his rebuttal to Harrelson, Tampa Bay is one of baseball's standard bearers in blending moneyball with statistics. St. Louis, the 2011 World Series champions, and San Francisco, winners of World Series titles in 2010 and 2012, are two other examples of teams using sabermetrics with solid scouting to field competitive teams. Baseball Prospectus and FanGraphs have also come closer to the middle and acknowledged that some scouting has its merits. The bottom line is sabermetrics has had a positive influence on the game in the past two decades and is now an indelible part of baseball.

We aren't frustrated with Harrelson for not seeing the benefits of sabermetrics. It's his distilling the argument down to the cliched "just give me guys who want to win" party line. What baseball player wants to take the field and lose a game. Maybe he knows some prospects at the Mercy Home for Baseball Players Who Just Wanna Win Games who should be on Sox SM Rick Hahn's radar